IPv6

Are you using IPv6? If so, what do you do with it? Does your ISP support it natively? We want to hear your IPv6 success stories, and share them with our readers. Either comment below or send e-mail via http://www.linuxjournal.com/contact, and we'll run your response in our upcoming Networking issue.

No, I don't use IPV6 and frankly have no intent on learning or using it; I just don't see the need. Having worked with what is now known as "IPV4" practically since it was deployed in the early 1980s I have zero interest in dealing with a new protocol.

No, not yet at least. I'm with Plusnet in the UK and whilst I took part in their IPv6 trial a year or so back this has now ended and am awaiting their rollout which will hopefully happen 'soon' (as always)... I am thus now back to using tunneling (via Hurricane Electric).

> If so, what do you do with it?

Connect to the Internet. As another poster has already mentioned, it really ought to be transparent to the user and for me and the rest of the family it is. We don't currently do anything over IPv6 that we didn't previously do with IPv4. I stopped looking for the IPv6 'killer app' years ago as I believe it detracts from the real issue. That capability will come, but we need to see greater universal support for IPv6 before it can happen...

One perhaps notable exception (and that's pushing it) is that I built the world's first IPv6-enabled Internet Cat Feeder - http://www.newtonnet.co.uk/catfeeder - and whilst it is dual stacked it serves as a real example of the 'Internet of Things' that we've all been talking about for a while now. Setting it up to operate over IPv6 was also a practical demonstration of how much easier it is compared with IPv4 - no NATs, port forwards, port collision avoidance etc to deal with. Instead you merely give it a globally unique address, configure the firewall, and It Just Works [TM].

I opened up access to the cat feeder on World IPv6 Day in June 2011 such that anyone who connected over IPv6 could view/control it. Over the 24hr period the cats received 168 meals compared with only twice a day previously so unless there's a fundamental flaw in my calculations that makes IPv6 84 times better than IPv4. Fact. ;-)

- Are you using IPv6?
Yes
- If so, what do you do with it?
Nothing more than with IPv4. Just to be ready for the futur
- Does your ISP support it natively?
Yes. I'm in France and my ISP (OVH Telecom) support dual stack IPv6 natively.

For one, I did the IPv6 certificate with Hurricane Electric and you need one running. You also get a very geeky T-Shirt when you succeed.
I am (one of many hats) Network Admin and just want to stay up2date. I actually had to use IPv6 at work once, just for a PoC. This was just a local internal setup. At home I have a permanent IPv6 setup via Hurricane Electric tunnel.
I also had IPv6 some time back on my server on the internet, but I moved and didn't get a chance to set it up again. My hoster provides IPv6 via a tunnel (tunnel endpoint on their end), so I do send emails right now via IPv6.

> Does your ISP support it natively?

No, unfortunately not. I am in UK and native IPv6 is very very rare here (there is one provider, but for businesses.)
So I am running a tunnel with HE. Works just fine.

Even though I am "certified" IPv6 with HE and do have some experience, it is still different in an enterprise. It is new and people need to get to know it first and I have experienced there are quite a lots of misunderstandings about IPv6 around. I like it though with my /48 and /64 address ranges, I have enough IP addresses, which is good and you can have never enough.

I wish I could deploy/migrate an IPv6 network in an enterprise soon, I really would love that.

All of my hosted VPS's have native IPv6. On some of them I've removed the IPv4 addresses, so they are *only* accessible via IPv6.

Alas, at home, my ISP (US/Texas) does not provide IPv6, so I use a tunnel from he.net to my router (running openWRT). When I set this up 2 or 3 years ago, I was really disappointed in the level of IPv6 support from consumer wireless routers. It looks like things have improved somewhat since then, but v6 support still looks like an afterthought for most products.

What do I use it for? Well, everything that traditionally used IPv4, of course! (ssh, http, imap, smtp, bt, ...etc)

As I see it, we will all migrate to IPv6 eventually (although I expect v4 and v6 will coexist for a very long time) - why not start using IPv6 now and start reaping the benefits of IPv6 as soon as possible? While working with IPv6 feels very foreign at first, one quickly finds that it is just much easier to manage than IPv4 (using v6, subnetting is trivial, plenty of available addrs in even a "small" /96 network, no need for NAT, etc)

Also in The Netherlands, and also using IPv6 where possible. xs4all gave me a static /48 net, which gives me enough address space to fill my whole house with 400 m3 of sand and address each of the grains individually.

At work I am trying to convince people that all services should be hosted on both address spaces, but some hosters really make this unnecessarily complicated.

I have been using IPv6 for almost 10 years now. I was responsible for the technical department of a small ISP in The Netherlands that I co-founded, and I implemented IPv6 everywhere as soon as I could. The routers, firewalls, DNS servers, mail servers and the ISP's own web servers all have IPv6. I left the ISP five years ago and am now a freelance consultant specialising in IPv6. I also run my own LISP (RFC6830) based ISP which of course has full IPv6 support. I helped several ISPs to implement IPv6 in their back-bones, data centres and access (DSL, fibre) networks, did some IPv6 consultancy for a Dutch bank and I am giving regular IPv6 training courses in the Middle East.

> If so, what do you do with it?

Use the internet. Seriously: using IPv6 should be invisible. It just works, behind the scenes. IPv6 is not something that you consciously use. It is the technology that lets us keep and increase the flexibility that the internet gives us today.

IPv4 addresses have run out. The last IPv4 addresses are in the distribution chain and are being handed out to users. Some parts of the world like the US still have some IPv4 addresses in their Regional Internet Registry (in the US that is ARIN). They distribute the right to use blocks of IP addresses to ISPs and companies, until they run out. ARIN is expected to run out approximately one year from now. In other parts of the world the RIRs have already run out, and the last IPv4 addresses are being used by ISPs. Enterprises in those regions cannot get their own provider independent IPv4 addresses anymore.

Because of the shortage of IPv4 addresses it won't be possible to give every connected subscriber his own IPv4 address anymore. IPv4 addresses have to be shared. And that means that the connected subscribers lose control over their internet connection. Certain applications (mostly VPNs to the office) will not work properly, running your own servers for web, mail and other applications will become impossible etc. For online applications (like banking) it will become almost impossible to distinguish between different subscribers based on their IPv4 address, so if one subscriber tries to attack the online service they will have no choice but to block all subscribers sharing the same IPv4 address. And that could be hundreds or thousands of subscribers.

IPv6 gives us enough addresses to give every user more than they will ever need. This sounds like a '640K ought to be enough for anybody' statement, until you do the math. Every LAN in IPv6 gets 2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses, and every subscriber gets a block big enough for multiple LANs (in Europe usually 65,536 subnets per subscriber, sometimes residential subscribers get only 256 subnets). Using IPv6 means that we don't do address-sharing-tricks, the subscriber keeps full control over his internet connection, and security can be as fine-grained (or even better) than it is today.

I've had my networks on IPv6 for a long time, now, as my original tunnel to the 6bone was over my Sprint T1. That was like 15 years ago. I originally connected to the 6bone to learn how this IPv6 stuff worked, and I'm still waiting for the rest of the world to figure out it's useful. My tunnel now is through he.net because it's the best solution I could find. (I have Comcast business-class as my provider, now, and they swear that they'll roll out native IPv6 Real Soon Now.) My VPS provider was chosen specifically because they offered native IPv6, among other criteria.

What I do with it is, well, stuff. All my computers have IPv6 addresses and I SSH to and from them, do Web stuff, and whatnot. Mr. Graber's experience notwithstanding, there seem to be a vanishingly small number of sites that are available over IPv6 and a vanishingly small number of people using IPv6, most of which (at least in my Apache logs) appear to be running Mac OSX. The last time I looked, about a year ago, I was getting about one IPv6 connection every other month while my normal traffic is maybe two or three hundred IPv4 connections a day. That's after filtering out my home addresses, of course.

Q: If so, what do you do with it?
A: Access to the IPv6 Interwebs. My VPS's have IPv6. So I can set a different address for each service, etc. Being allocated a /64 and having that many routable addresses is a no-brainer.

Q: Does your ISP support it natively?

A: Supposedly it is coming to crapcast. I have yet to see it.

I have an Asus n66r router which has firmware based on dd-wrt. I have a hurricane electric IPv6 tunnel set up through it. Very handy to be able to have a publicly accessible IPv6 address for every device. Having to beef up on iptables in my firewall box though.

Q: If so, what do you do with it?
A: Access to the IPv6 Interwebs. My VPS's have IPv6. So I can set a different address for each service, etc. Being allocated a /64 and having that many routable addresses is a no-brainer.

Q: Does your ISP support it natively?

A: Supposedly it is coming to crapcast. I have yet to see it.

I have an Asus n66r router which has firmware based on dd-wrt. I have a hurricane electric IPv6 tunnel set up through it. Very handy to be able to have a publicly accessible IPv6 address for every device. Having to beef up on iptables in my firewall box though.

My home ISP does not yet have IPv6 support. They gave me the "We have enough IPv4, so we don't care" line. This made me sad. My VPS provider does offer IPv6, which has come in very handy for VPN access from places that don't.

I am testing the IPv6 on everything I can get my hands on. Gotta do it early to avoid the panic when IPv4 fully exhausts and the laggards finally freak out.

Hey there just wanted to give you a quick
heads up. The words in your article seem to be running off the screen in Ie.
I'm not sure if this is a format issue or something to do with web browser compatibility but I thought I'd post to let you know.

The style and design look great though! Hope you get the issue resolved
soon. Kudos

A: It depends on the situation:
At work: yes - Leibniz Supercomputing Centre supports native IPv6
At home: in theory the Deutsche Telekom could give IPv6-Adresses, practically I am still forced to use a tunnel broker
on the way: I am a lucky UMTS/IPV6-tester - native IPv6.(with NAT64)

Not too surprisingly as the networking guy for Ubuntu, I've been using IPv6 for years now.
My home ISP (teksavvy) supports it natively, I have a separate IPv4 and IPv6 PPP sessions with a /29 IPv4 subnet and a /56 IPv6 subnet statically assigned to me.

During a normal month, IPv6 typically represents 75% of my traffic (around 800GB) though that's mostly explained because of backups of other IPv6 capable machines and because of Google who's been supporting IPv6 on all their services for a while now.
I've occasionaly had issues with my IPv4 connectivty ending up in a few hours of surfing in the IPv6-only world, which is surprisingly usable so long as you mostly use Google, Wikipedia and things like the Debian servers which are all dual-stack.

I also have native IPv6 for my hosted server in Germany (hetzner) so all my server services are dual-stack.

For some other networks I managed (family setup) where native IPv6 isn't available yet, I'm using HE.net IPv6 tunnels. Those are very reliable, free and often provide a shorter (number of hops and latency) path between two hosts than going through the standard IPv4 route.

So in short, I've got IPv6 everywhere and try to make sure I never put something new online that's not IPv6 capable and that I port or retire anything that's already online and that's IPv4-only.
There are a few things that people will need to get used to to get good IPv6 connectivity though, like making sure ICMP packets aren't blocked in or out and that the MTU/PMTU is set properly on all machines. But that's really where most of the pain has been for me, the rest tends to just work.

Now it's just a matter of waiting for the rest of the world to catchup!